Whether someone is a country person or a city person has a profound impact on how they seem to perceive the world.
As a complete overgeneralization:
Country people are better at learning things by themselves and have no problem asserting themselves as the best at what they do.
City people are better at working with others to accomplish a goal but often struggle in taking on new tasks and responsibilities.
In my experience, you see a lot more country people become city people than you do city become country. Not sure how this works logistically, but we’re going to go with it.
It’s also been my experience that if the country person decides to merge with the city world, they will often over-perform the city person.
It seems odd that this would be the case since they would have the obvious disadvantage of not being familiar with the normal city ways of life. However, this can become an asset for them. When you don’t know the “rules” it’s much easier to get away with breaking them.
What I’ve said so far is pretty much all in favor of the country person. Are they better in every way? They have serious advantages, which I’ll get into in a minute, but there are some glaring problems I often see.
Because the country person often has great success when moving into the city world, they tend to carry a lot of pride. City people are no stranger to pride, but this is a different kind of pride. It’s an “I don’t need to know this and I’m still successful” rather than the city person equivalent of “because I know this I’m successful.”
For this reason, country people work well as lone businessmen or sometimes as the drivers behind companies. You will very rarely see them in a customer facing role (though they can sometimes thrive in a sales role). The relatability factor is simply not there and the people skills that have been replaced by work ethic make them a tough fit working with others.
The biggest advantage or skill that I have seen country people possess is a skill to learn on their own. Country people from a young age are taught independence in many areas. We see this with things even like farmers permits. But it goes beyond this into chores, upkeep of property, often working on their own cars, making fixes on their house.
They usually come from a background of “if it’s broken, how broken is it?” Followed by “It’s broken enough that I have to fix it.”
This is one of the largest assets country people have. An ability to learn things that are new and foreign to them. This is why they often thrive once they switch over to the city. They don’t have many of the hard skills, but the soft skill of being able to learn quickly trumps not having the hard skills and they become very knowledgeable very fast.
They’ve learned independence.
I tried to do the opposite of the norm and learn how to be a county boy after being a city boy all growing up and it’s become clear to me that the only way to be a country boy is to grow up a country boy. It’s impossible to become one later.
I’ve learned a lot being city-minded while learning to comprehend country mindedness. I’m somewhere in the middle now – a mix.
There’s benefit in both kinds of person, just focus on the good parts of it and see how you can work on the other
If you can create a team with a balance of both, you’ve got yourself a pretty sweet deal.